Man With a Plan

Across the face of Asia, from Vladivostok to the Bay of Bengal, the fighting men of five nations this week awaited Japan's next move. Russians, Chinese, Britons, Indians and Americans nervously tried to foresee the thrust of a military machine which has so far won at almost every turn of battle and politics, in almost every phase of war in the Far East.

A sense of emergency tautened the air of Allied uncertainty. Japanese feints and lunges at the Aleutians, the China seaboard, the northeastern frontiers of India, the northern fringes of Australia, and at Russia's far eastern borders bound the Allies in a web of contradictory plans and policies. Their only certainty was that the Japanese, unaided and therefore unfettered by allies, had a plan, and that the plan would be boldly executed.

It was a time and a scene for individual achievement, individual disaster. General Wavell in India, defending a people who wished him gone, blessed the monsoons which temporarily shrouded and protected the Bay of Bengal. Chennault in China, with his hardy but insufficient U.S. air force, at least taught the Japs what it was to be hit, and dreamed of what he could do with just a little more (see p. 26). MacArthur, trapped in Australia (see p. 44), had to obey orders and watch the play of Asian history from his seat Down Under.

Of one man whom Destiny might flick at any moment, the western world knew almost nothing. Most people in the U.S. had never heard his name. Yet he was a man who had devoted all his latter years to a scheme of Asian empire which touched the Russians and the Chinese first of all, but in the close-knit world of 1942 mattered enormously to the U.S. as well. He was a short and flabby man of 57, with protruding cheekbones and a mummy-like skin, who had said of himself: "I have often been likened to a corpse on reprieve."

He was Itagaki--General Seishiro Itagaki--a soldier whom only Japan could produce.

Cradle of Hate. Itagaki was born at precisely the right time. In 1885, when his peasant mother bore him in Iwate Prefecture, the Samurai grip on the Japanese army had been broken for twelve years. Until 1873, only the sons of Japan's warrior caste could be officers; and, until a very few years before that, ingrown Japan was uninterested in the schemes of conquest which alone could develop military imperialists. As it was, Seishiro Itagaki was free to join and rise in the new army. Japan in his boyhood was storing up the ambitions, greeds and hatreds which first exploded upon the white man's world in the year when Itagaki graduated from the Military Academy.

That year, 1904, had a meaning which the world is only now beginning to understand. It was the year when the Japanese struck the Russians at Port Arthur and defeated them. It was the year when the Japanese first tested themselves, their arms and their creed of conquest against an occidental power. And, with 1905, it was the period when their hatred of the U.S., already born, was rooted in them. For it seemed to the Japanese that Teddy Roosevelt, waving the white man's big stick and dictating the Treaty of Portsmouth, saved the Russians' in Asia and robbed Japan of the full fruits of victory.

Itagaki was too young and too obscure for a recorded part in the Russo-Japanese War. But he shared with the army the pride of remembrance, the deep intent to complete the conquest of Asia which the Russo-Japanese War had merely begun. Brooding upon a Russia still in Asia, a U.S. thrusting into the near Pacific through the Philippines, he began his rise.

Office Soldier. Itagaki matured in an army which was singularly selfless, yet afforded wide scope to men of his particular stamp. He was not a great fighting man. In fact, in 1938 at the famed battle of Taierhchwang (TIME, April 11, 1938 et ante), the Chinese made a military fool of him, trapping his forces and killing 25,000 Japanese in a battle which may yet go down as one of the determining conflicts of history.

The story goes that Itagaki wanted to commit hara-kiri after his disgrace, that his aides forcibly dissuaded him. The known fact is more characteristic of Itagaki. He did not spill his bowels. Instead he returned to Tokyo and shortly attained the highest post open to him: War Minister in the cabinet of Prince Fumimaro Konoye. Men in other armies concluded that he was a mere politician, a fixer, a conniver who throve on the favor of better men.

These judgments were probably wrong. In the Japanese army and the Japanese system, the military politician has a peculiar value. The army is not only "in politics"; it dominates Japanese politics. No Cabinet can survive without the army's approval. Political genius was therefore closely allied to military genius, and the soldier with genius or capacity in both fields was all the more necessary to the army. Itagaki therefore had to take no insult when his closest friend and associate, General Juzo Nishio, said: "I'll do the fighting. Let Itagaki do the office work."

Drinking Team. Squat, ugly Itagaki and lean, handsome General Nishio made a perfect army team. They drank great quantities of sake together, Itagaki growing garrulous and gay, Nishio sour and taciturn on the gently powerful wine. They shared two of the controlling passions of the Japanese army: a hatred of Communists and a companion hatred of Japan's great capitalist families (the Mitsuis, Iwasakis, Sumitomos and Yasudas) on the twin grounds that their abuses fostered Communism and that they disputed the mastery of Japan with the army. When others laid an indiscreetly heavy hand upon the princes of money, Itagaki soothed the offended financiers without in the least surrendering the army's supremacy. And, all the while, Itagaki and Nishio managed to extend their grips upon the sources and tendrils of army power. Today the Premier, General Hideki Tojo, is commonly supposed to be their man.

One Among Three. Itagaki's career and power had their foundations in the area where he now waits to strike: in North China, Manchuria and the near borders of Russia's Siberia (see map). There were bred Japanese hates, fears and hopes which only war could release. There too, in a vast segment of the earth almost unknown to the U.S. people, swirled forces which deeply involved the U.S. and, at least in Japanese minds, committed the U.S. to a final war for Asia.

Most people in the U.S. were hardly aware of an Asian event which Itagaki and the Japanese army never forget. That event was the weird (to Occidental minds) and semicomic Japanese invasion of Russian territory in 1918. The Japs chose an opportune moment, when Red Russia was weak aborning, to endeavor a second time to drive the Russian bear out of the Far East. They wanted, and seized, Russia's northern half of the island of Sakhalin, the half rich in coal and oil, and added it to their southern half. In the guise of Allied intervention, they seized Vladivostok, a port worthwhile for itself and dangerously near Japan's home islands. They attempted to lodge their armies deep in southern Siberia, so far north of China and Manchuria that the Russians could never strike through that area at a sphere which Japan held to be its own, or at Japan itself. Thus did the Japs justify this outrageous grab.

The Russians were weak enough, so weak that they passively relinquished what they could not defend. But the Japs were as yet none too strong, certainly not strong enough to withstand the U.S. diplomatic pressure which was soon turned upon them. Because of this pressure, they withdrew their armies, returned formal sovereignty over the invaded territory to Russia, kept some trading concessions--and never forgave the U.S. Once again, just as in the earlier Russo-Japanese War's aftermath, the U.S., all unknowing, had indelibly-imprinted itself in Japanese minds as an enemy of Japan in Asia.

Japan's other enemies were Russia and China. Itagaki as War Minister, excusing his protracted failure to close the "Chinese Incident" and justifying bigger & bigger war budgets, stamped China's Chiang Kai-shek as a personal enemy to be exterminated. He repeatedly pointed to the U.S.S.R. as a Communist peril and an Asian rival to be driven from Japan's ordained sphere. Less often, less pointedly in the middle '30s, when Japan was shaping the final blows to come, did he and other military spokesmen refer to the U.S. as an enemy. But the U.S. never lapsed from their memories and their plans. With delicate foresight and precision, they geared their machine of conquest to strike in any order that world events dictated. As it happened, China was first, the U.S. second in timing. Russia was third--but only in timing. In the sphere which Seishiro Itagaki marked out for himself, Russia was always first.

Sharpen the Blade. A unique segment of the Japanese army is the Kwantung army, and Itagaki is its master. He and his companions in conquest shaped it for a single purpose: the extension of Japanese sway over northern Asia. The creation of Manchukuo achieved part of this aim; only attack on Russian Asia can complete the scheme.

The special status of Itagaki's army testifies to the quality of his military and political planning, the importance of his sphere. His Kwantung army is responsible, not to the War Office in Tokyo, but to the Emperor himself. In this--to the Japanese--vital respect, the Kwantung army is on a par with the Japanese army as a whole.

It is an army designed for political and economic, as well as military, conquest. In Manchukuo the Kwantung army operates factories, railways, mines. It controls trade. Many of its officers, Itagaki included, have grown rich on its spoils--a rare thing in the Japanese forces, whose generals get only 6,600 yen (about $1,550) per year in salary. Manchukuo is Japan's laboratory of total warfare, a training ground not only for fighting men but for imperial exploiters and rulers.

New railways, new roads, new factories to produce weapons for his army--with them all, Itagaki has sharpened a blade to be used against Russia. His railways, radiating from the great hub at Harbin, thread outward to the likeliest points of border attack, and to the ports which connect his embryo empire with Japan. His roads are military highways, and their target, too, is the long, perambulant border which divides Japanese Manchukuo from Russia's Asian fringes.

Just how strong the army is, only the Japanese know. The minimum guess last week was 30 divisions (about 400,000 men); the maximum, 50, (about 700,000 men), including three armored divisions, six light mechanized divisions, about 1,100 planes. More significant was its known distribution: one concentration east of Harbin, opposite the Ussuri River and the Vladivostok area; another in Manchukuo's remote northwestern corner, along the Argun and Amur River borders of Siberia. At precisely these points the Japanese had the most to gain from sudden attacks.

Await the Blow. Hard pressed though they are on the southern front (see p. 20), the Russians also have an army ready and trained for Asian war. Since 1928 one of Moscow's fixed policies has been preparation for that war, and part of the preparation was the drive to create an independent, self-sufficient "second Russia" in Siberia.

When Russians labored and died to fling new cities, mills, oil wells, power plants and railways across Soviet Asia, they were making ready for war with Japan as well as with Germany. In the raw lands of Siberia, Russia already had gold, platinum, iron, coal, silver, lead, oil, manganese, mercury, tin, potash, bauxite and timber in fabulous but unexploited abundance. Now the Russians, after ten years of stupendous striving, have the beginnings of an industrial empire, a land of ice and sun, of steel and honey, which is by no means the frozen waste of fiction (TIME, July 27).

And, if worst comes to worst on their German front, they have another Russia between the Urals and the Pacific, bigger than all of European Russia and the U.S. combined.

But its best lands are Asian, and Japan is at the door. Russia has always known as much, and Soviet Russia built her Asian army with her Asian industries. Its founder was one of the great soldiers and adventurers of modern times, Marshal Vasily Bluecher. Some said that he had been purged when he dropped from sight three years ago, but he was recently reported training fresh reserves in Siberia. At any rate, the present commander of the Soviet Union's border army is General Grigory Mikhailovich Stern, a hard and clever Jewish warrior who has already taken the Japanese measure.

He has had many a chance to do so.

For Russia and Japan have been in a state of armed belligerence for more than ten years. Since 1931, Moscow and Tokyo have reported at least 2,500 border clashes. Most of them were tiny, local affrays; a few were on battle scale, with planes, tanks and artillery in full combat. Each army used them to test the weapons and tactics of the other, and the Japanese got some unpleasant surprises. On the Khalka River in 1939 the Russians produced new tanks, which appalled the Japanese and probably postponed any plan for all-out war that Tokyo was nursing. Together these incidents made a fantastic chapter in modern war, a chapter possible only to two peoples who expected war some day, but mutually determined to avoid it until one or the other was ready.

Disperse for Battle. London sources last week reported that General Stern has no less than 60 divisions (about 800,000 men), including 30 armored brigades, in four groups along his winding, 2,100-mile border. Other estimates were that he had about half as many men; 1,200 to 1,500 planes. Whatever his force, whatever the strength that he has had to divert to the Hitler front, he must disperse his Asian armies to meet their peculiarly difficult problem of defense.

Japan's main targets are bound to be two: Vladivostok in the southeast, and the famed Trans-Siberian Railway, the long and vulnerable artery of Russian Asia (see map). Since Russia lost the shorter, more direct Chinese Eastern Railway through conquered Manchuria to Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian has been the U.S.S.R.'s only land link with her Pacific port. And the Trans-Siberian is perilously open to attack: by land and air from northwestern Manchukuo, by land across the wide but easily passable Gobi (which, for all its fearsome reputation, is more like Nebraska and the Dakotas than the Sahara). An alternate rail line, several hundred miles inside the Russian border, is far from completion. Itagaki's invaders, attacking the Trans-Siberian, will also be assaulting Russian Asia's key cities: Chita, a junction point on the Trans-Siberian; Khabarovsk, a new factory center which is also the headquarters of General Stern's armies; Blagoveshchensk, now almost within shell range of the Japanese in extreme northern Manchukuo; and, well beyond the Far Eastern border, the new steel & oil city of Komsomolsk, pride of the young Russians who built it.

General Stern cannot hope to defend his whole line. Instead he has a string of strong points, some to be held against the Japanese. Thus, if & when the new war between Russia and Japan begins, it will be one of great initial advances for the Japs, hard & fast counterblows for the Russians.

In the end, the Japanese will probably be well pleased if they can storm Vladivostok by land, air and sea, slice up the Trans-Siberian, come to rest near Lake Baikal, retake the rich half of Sakhalin which they lost after winning it 17 years ago. Then they will have a sufficient barrier between Russia and Japanese Asia. They will have removed, at Vladivostok, an ever-present threat of Russian or U.S. air attack on Tokyo itself. Russian aid to China will be completely shut off, and Chiang Kai-shek's resistance may finally be smothered.

A Fool and His Power. Thus does Seishiro Itagaki preach the possibilities and rewards of North Asian conquest. For this he has prepared his Kwantung army. Now he weighs the coming of August and September, the two months of all the year when climate along the border best favors assault. Now, if ever, Russia is weak.

Opportunity knocks, and the sound is pleasant to Itagaki's ear. But he cannot listen to the call from Siberia without cocking an ear toward North China as well. He must have heard lately that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has sent the trusted Vice Chief of his General Staff, Mohammedan General Pai Tsung-hsi, to look over that vital area on the Kwantung army's flank. Perhaps, as some Chinese think, Itagaki may time an attack to protect his flank and close the long-unclosed "China Incident." Else General Pai and China's northern armies under General Hu Tsung-nan may be stout aids to General Stern in Siberia.

From Manchukuo and Itagaki, no word of intention came. No word will come, unless it be the word of attack. General Itagaki knows well an old Japanese proverb: "Anyone is a fool if he has power and shows it."

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